“Typically, most proponents of the ’Black Belt nation’ thesis in the current debate over the national question start their analysis with Stalin’s ’definition’ of a nation.”
In this way Guardian editor Irwin Silber begins the second installment of his recent six-part series on the Afro-American question appearing in this newspaper. He follows the assertion with a quote from Mao Tsetung stating that Marxists, as opposed to dogmatists, “start from objective facts, not from abstract definitions” in deriving their “guiding principles, policies and measures.”
Thus “most” of those who uphold the right of self-determination for Black people in the Deep South, Silber suggests, are “dogmatists” who “go out into the world Diogenes-like, armed with their appropriate quotations from Stalin, in search of a social entity which corresponds to their ’definition.’”
The first question raised by Silber’s assertion is whether or not it is true. Do “most proponents” of the Black Belt Nation thesis dogmatically use “definitions” as the starting point of their analysis?
They do not and the assertion is incorrect. As anyone can determine by investigating the various polemics and political statements made in the debate, most of the political organizations involved have taken as their starting point various estimates of the objective conditions and subjective factors in the class and national struggles in the U.S.
The October League (OL), for instance, which has most consistently upheld a revolutionary line on this issue, takes as its starting point the objective fact of imperialism’s division of the world into oppressed and oppressor nations. In turn this has given rise in the U.S. to “two great revolutionary forces”–the American workers’ movement and the Black liberation struggle–and that the “alliance and merger” of these two struggles constitutes the central strategic problem of forming a united front against imperialism.
It notes the history of both internationalist and chauvinist lines in the workers’ movement on the issue and proceeds to discuss the conditions of Black people–all before mentioning Stalin’s definition. (See the OL pamphlet, “The Struggle for Black Liberation and Socialist Revolution.”)
The Black Workers Congress, which has since divided into several groups over issues other than the national question, began its early 1974 statement in a similar way. Its starting point was with the objective fact of imperialism’s general crisis and the rise of the third world. It reviews the intensification of the “two basic contradictions” in the U.S.–between the working class and the capitalist class and between the imperialists and the oppressed Black nation and national minorities–and goes on to summarize a class analysis answering the question, “Who are friends, who are enemies” of the anti-imperialist united front. Again, Stalin’s definition is brought in later. (See the BWC pamphlet, “The Black Liberation Struggle, the Black Workers Congress and Proletarian Revolution.”)
The polemics between the Revolutionary Union (RU) on the one hand and the BWC, Puerto Rican Revolutionary Workers Organization (PRRWO) and I Wor Kuen (IWK) on the other also involved the Afro-American question and a repudiation of RU’s “proletarian nation of a new type” line. While Stalin’s definition was definitely a factor in the debate, it was not the starting point. Rather it was the subjective condition of RU’s white chauvinist attacks on the nationalism of the oppressed peoples as “Bundism” and its liquidation of the right of self-determination. PRRWO supported the Black Belt nation thesis while IWK has not yet taken a position. (See RU’s Red Papers 6.)
The Congress of Afrikan People (CAP) has not yet completed its current series presenting its summed-up views in the debate, although it upholds the right of the Black nation to self-determination. While CAP’s opening installment on the issue in its newspaper Unity and Struggle leads off with a paraphrase of Stalin’s definition, it should be clear that the organization’s starting point has been the struggle against a narrow nationalist line liquidating a class analysis and class struggle in the Black liberation movement.
So where are the “dogmatists” described in Silber’s series as those who “start with definitions” and constitute “most” of those in the debate? There are only two such organizations–one small group of ex-RU cadres that doesn’t exist anymore and another which now openly apologizes for the Soviet Union and has deserted the communist movement.
The first of these two, the ex-RU cadres, showed a strong tendency toward dogmatism in their document printed in the June 26, 1974, Guardian Radical Forum. While they made a number of good criticisms of RU and stressed the importance of analyzing concrete conditions, they also stated that “the starting point for a correct position on the Black national question must reaffirm that: (1) Stalin’s definition of a nation is correct.”
The second group is the Communist League (CL), now called the Communist Labor Party. It is the only organization which really fits Silber’s description of dogmatism. Its document, “Negro National Colonial Question,” starts with several pages of definitions. But what Silber’s articles did not point out is that the other groups agreeing with the Black Belt nation thesis have exposed and criticized CL’s dogmatism many times.
Silber’s series also misrepresents CL’s actual line in a way that can be taken either to make CL look better than it is or to incorrectly characterize the 1928 and 1930 Comintern resolutions on the Black national question. Silber states that CL’s line is based “in large measure on the Comintern resolutions” and that CL, among others, raises “the demand for self-determination.”
In fact CL in more than a “large measure” opposes the line of the Comintern in what CL itself says are “obvious and sharp” differences. The most obvious difference, contrary to Silber’s statement, is that CL is against the demand for self-determination. Instead it says the Black nation is a “colony” and the only “scientific” demand is for “independence,” both points being explicitly rejected by the Comintern.
Thus the only group today that should correctly be targeted as dogmatist in its starting point on the Afro-American question does not even hold to the key points in the “dogmatist” line Silber’s series has attacked.
Silber’s erroneous position here raises two other points on the issue of method: What is the correct starting point and what is Silber’s starting point?